The maxim that “water is life” has never had more serious implications—reaching back into history, down into spongy aquifers, and up into kitchen sinks. Three in ten people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, and six in ten lack access to adequate sanitation facilities. Today’s strained water systems are one of the public goods that have been most resistant to total capture by private capital. But this capture—coming largely in the form of convoluted financial maneuvering and hybrid management schemes—is nevertheless well underway. In urban areas especially, infrastructural services blur the nominally sovereign borders between public works and corporate monopoly. If there is a right to water, who holds the rights to the pipes?

Liquid Utility is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University as part of their project “Power: Infrastructure in America.”